Decomposing the barriers to equal pay: examining differential predictors of the gender pay gap by socio-economic group

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 15, 2025

Summary:

Our article examines different predictors of the gender pay gap at the mean and for different income groups. Using the United Kingdom Household Panel Survey (UKHLS), we provide a detailed analysis of the effects of individual work histories, with up to 40 years of retrospective data examined alongside other key indicators. Work histories provide a powerful means of measuring the long-term effects of reduced labour force attachment on pay for women and for men. We find that gendered differentials in work-history account for 29% of the gender pay gap at the mean and that the effects of women’s reduced attachment vary by income group. We find men to earn a higher wage penalty to part-time work-histories than women, and find no evidence of a penalty to part-time work more generally in poor households. We conclude that gender equalisation policies need to reflect divergent needs by income group.

Published in

Cambridge Journal of Economics

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/beaf025

ISSN

0309166

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright © 2025, © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society.

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